Hey there, MyIGN readers. After going a few days this weekend without being able to log in and post, I made the decision to start self-hosting my video game reviews and related content. It was kind of lame having some content ready to go for you guys and not being able to post. It seems the write.ign.com servers were timing out.

Moments ago I heard from Steve Butts, IGN's Editor-in-Chief, that the blogs are back up, and voila, here I am!

So what'd you miss during the outage? Well, two whole new video game reviews, actually!

I'll try to remember to come back here and link to stuff occasionally, and I'll miss talking in all the comments with you all, so please bookmark my site to keep chatting with my over there. And follow me on Twitter: @joshuadelung.

This way I'll hang on to all my new content, and I won't have to deal with all the bugs on MyIGN that just never have seemed to get worked out the last few years. It's also just a matter of convenience for me. I'm streamlining all my web content into that site, even from my other blogs.

Thanks for all the good times the last 4+ years. This has been and I'm sure will continue to be a great community.

Hello, MyIGN community! Been a little while since I posted, but if you missed last month's data-driven piece on Xbox Live's Games with Gold vs. Playstation Network's PS Plus, go check out the comments that are still going on there. So where have I been, and why have my posts been so infrequent as opposed to the steady stream of full-length reviews you're used to? Two reasons primarily: I bought a house in June, and even a good house takes a heckuva lot of work to keep everything running smoothly. Not to mention I ended up with a big ol' yard, and that means lots of yard work. Aside from house stuff, work has been very busy, and I couldn't tell you the last time I had an actual 40-hour week. Not that I'm complaining, I'm happy to have a job and a senior-level position such as the one I'm in requires putting in some extra time. But man, I sure do miss the days of endless weekend gaming marathons or playing games on the couch at night until I can't stay awake anymore.

In summary, being an adult sucks. And it seems like so many games come out now compared to when I was a kid, teenager, college student, etc. When N64 launched, I had Pilot Wings and Mario 64 for two months. Now you whippersnappers get 20 good games a month. You have a plethora of indie titles from which to choose on top of all the first- and third-party action. And I just don't have enough time to play everything. So I live vicariously though the rest of you on Twitter and through the gaming podcasts I catch while I spend two or more hours a day in D.C.-area traffic.

Let's just say my weekly Raptr summary has had the little sad face on it for quite a few weeks in a row.

But enough about me. I'm writing this because I have actually played quite a few games since my last set of quickfire reviews. It's just that finding the times to write about gaming, even on the weekends, has been tough. Especially when I sometimes only have a few free hours and the choice is between more gaming or just writing about it! I think from now on most of my reviews will be in the quickfire format. And because I liked to sync my ratings up with the MyIGN games collection feature/ratings but that feature seems pretty broken still, I am going to change my review format to "play it" or "skip it," maybe with something in between from time to time. I think overall this rating system, as opposed to a points system, will ultimately devalue games less. Often, a 5 or 6 out of 10 might be a really fun time for the right person.

Without further ado, here's my latest round of quickfire reviews:

Uncharted: Golden Abyss (Vita)

I'd heard so many good things about the Uncharted series but never played any of the games because I don't own a PS3. But in preparation for making the jump from Xbox 360 to PS4, I bought a PS Vita for my long plane ride last summer knowing that it'd get me started in the Sony universe and eventually be a remote play device for the next-gen Playstation console. I know that Naughty Dog, the usual developer for Uncharted games, didn't do this handheld version, but I still expected more. It's basically a mediocre third-person shooter with poor cover mechanics and little variety to how weapons handle or enemies act. I turned most of the touch controls off, but you're still forced to do silly things like rub the screen to clean artifacts or create charcoal rubbings. The story was mildly entertaining, and the dialogue in the second half between Sully and Nathan Drake was the only thing that kept me going. The traversal elements need some other element of challenge added — as they stand, you just hold the left stick in the direction of the next glowing ledge and watch Nate do everything for you. This game wasn't even as pretty as I'd expected knowing that it was one of the Vita's flagship launch titles. Good, not great. Free if you're a PS Plus subscriber. PLAY IT.

Rayman Origins (Vita)

I know Rayman Legends recently came out, and it is a newer version of Rayman with new levels that also includes this game as I understand it. However, Origins came out as a free release to PS Plus subscribers, so I gave it a shot. I had tried the demo on Xbox 360 when the game originally released and decided it wasn't for me. But this is the type of game that's perfect for the Vita platform. Levels that aren't too long and that are just challenging enough that you feel accomplished after completing one but don't need a lot of time to do so. And man, the colorful art looks great on that OLED screen. I won't be replaying all the levels and doing speed runs to get a platinum trophy, but this was a very fun game. However, there's no story to speak of, and there's a pointless system where you can unlock dozens of characters — who all basically have the exact same features. Not sure what that's about. If you love pretty games and old school platforming, PLAY IT.

Frobisher Says! (Vita)

Ever played the Warioware: Smooth Moves on Wii? That's exactly what this game reminded me of. Except it follows the typical free-to-play method of giving you about 5-10 minigames and asking you to pay for more. And when the minigames are only a few seconds long and can all pretty much be accessed during the course of one round of the game, that's just silly. Either make it a full game and let me buy it, or let me try enough to actually make a better-educated decision about whether or not more levels are worth my time and money. The microtransaction/free-to-play balance is a tough one to successfully strike, but it seems like a lot of devs just don't use common sense there. This is a decent idea, but it's not something I think would keep many people's attention for long unless you could use it as a party game. SKIP IT.

Machinarium (Vita)

I played this game on Steam on my Mac a few years ago, but I never finished it because I got stumped on a puzzle and never went back. This is another game that just works so well on the Vita though. And I came to realize that if you look closely at your environment, there are plenty of hints to get you thinking about each situation in a way that will help you figure out how to get to the next area and solve the puzzles. I'm really glad this came to PS Plus and fell back into my lap. If you're not familiar with Machinarium, it's about the journey of a little robot escaping from the clutches of evil robots who have imprisoned his friends. It's essentially like those classic point-and-click adventure games we all played on PC in the early and mid-'90s (or more recently the form of The Walking Dead or The Wolf Among Us from Telltale Games). The difference is that Machinarium is a much smarter game that relies on combining elements from various locations in the environment in interesting ways instead of relying on a story element. In fact, it has zero voiceover or text in the entire game — the minor story elements are conveyed via the art itself, using thought bubbles or character emotions. This is a pretty quick play and inexpensive regardless of what platform you buy it on. I will say on Vita there is one annoying bit where the port from PC to Vita still leaves a mouse cursor on the screen (you can control it with the left stick as well as with touch) that wiggles around annoyingly without prompting it to from time to time. PLAY IT.

Assassin's Creed II (Xbox 360)

Are you recognizing a trend here? Yeah, most of the stuff I've played lately has been free with an Xbox Live Games with Gold or Playstation Network PS Plus subscription. With the current-gen now last-gen, there are some older games I'm catching up on through these subscriptions, and there's not much new out that I'd be buying anyway. It's worked out pretty well. Especially as a Vita owner. But the titles on Games with Gold for Xbox 360 have been less spectacular. Most of them I'd already played, but I actually never got into the Assassin's Creed series, so I was excited to try AC2. Despite great voice acting and an interesting environment, the gameplay is so clunky and discombobulated that I just can't take it. The story is weird and takes way too long to develop. I put a few hours into AC2 then left it behind very uninterested in trying AC3 after seeing the poor reactions it got from critics. AC4 has seemed to review much better, but I just don't think this series is as good as the marketing hype around it always tries to project. SKIP IT.

Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes (Xbox 360)

This game has been on multiple platforms but was a recent GWG release on 360. This XBLA title is fun, has a cute classic JRPG SNES art vibe and contains a mind-bending puzzle element to the gameplay. The battles are turn-based, but not in the classic RPG sense. Instead, you line up armies of unlocked characters (sort of like Pokémon, but you create formations with more than one character onscreen at a time) and try to get by your enemy's formations to do base damage. There are ways to align formations to get higher combos, build defense walls, etc. I did the entire first campaign (including all the puzzle challenges and sidequests) and had a lot of fun. However, the battles just get very repetitive and I found myself wanting more freedom than the linear gameplay offers. I'm torn on whether or not to recommend this one, so I'll just say MAYBE TRY IT.

Just Cause 2 (Xbox 360)

I haven't had time to make it very far in this one yet. I did the first few missions all in one day and unlocked the larger world map. Seems like an open world game from this point forward, but the world map is really bad and huge and just very intimidating. I haven't gone back to it yet because I feel like I'll need a few uninterrupted hours to get into it. That being said, I loved what I've played so far. I can't say I've ever played a game exactly like this. It's just crazy with the amount of action packed in and the destructible environments. I took out a huge military base, then I rescued some guy from the top story of a casino... oh, and I did that by hookshotting to the top of the building, then jumping off the roof onto an enemy helicopter, then using the helicopter to take out all the enemies on a skybridge connecting to two casino skyscrapers and then parachuting out to join my buddy. After that? Oh not much, just surfed on top of a car and jumped from vehicle to vehicle during a car chase scene, taking out enemy vehicles one at a time. The hookshot-to-anything ability just makes for some insane unrealistic action movie gameplay moments that left me wondering how this game slipped under my radar for so long. PLAY IT.

Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath (Vita)

This was originally an Xbox 1 game. No, not Xbox One. Like original Xbox. And it really shows in the Vita port. I haven't finished this game and don't even know yet if I will. You have to hunt your ammo. That's annoying. This game tries to be both platformer and FPS, so there's constant switching of perspective. Annoying. The camera is bad. Annoying. The jumping mechanism gets hung up in weird places pretty often. Annoying. Oh, and the characters and their voices in general are really Annoying. Probably SKIP IT.

Sound Shapes (Vita)

Also now available on PS4 (and previously on PS3), Sound Shapes is probably best suited for Vita. It's such an amazing little combination of puzzle, platformer, music and bullet hell game. You traverse levels not only using your eyes, but also your ears. You'll want headphones for this one. Listen to the beats to figure out when platforms are going to appear or enemies are going to shoot a laser at you. There's a level in the campaign, the first level from the Beck album, that is just one of the most genius levels I have ever played in a game. Cloud platforms made of the letters A and H appear as the lyrics go "Ahhhhhhh!" and other platforms made of words go from safe to instant-kill as the lyrics switch from happy words to words such as "hurt" or "break." The campaign alone is so, so fun. But it's super short. The post-campaign levels are split between Beat School and Death Mode. The latter puts you in one-screen levels with tons of obstacles to dodge as you collect a set number of music notes before time expires. Lots of trial and error there. Beat School is useless if you have no rhythm or can't play music by ear. The game plays you a series of notes, then cuts off the music, and you have to then write the music by touching the screen to drop notes along a music sheet. The only way I got those trophies was trial and error, playing the song again after randomly dropping notes and seeing which ones I got right and moving the others to new spaces and trying again.

Ended up getting the platinum in Sound Shapes, but half the game is definitely better than the other. However, the bang for your buck is enormous. There's a huge community of people uploading their own albums that you can play, or you can use the level editor to make your own. PLAY IT.

Batman Arkham Origins: Blackgate (Vita)

This game had me very excited when it was announced, and it could've been so awesome. But it's mediocre like its console counterpart. The game is presented in 2.5-D. Yes, that's right. It's mostly a sidescroller, but sometimes you can climb backwards/forwards in the environment or round a corner that flips the camera to a new direction. While a neat idea, it doesn't work. Or at least it's not well-implemented here. The devs didn't do anything to the map to help portray these changing perspectives. It's a 2-D map in a world that essentially rotates and changes perspective as you play, so you never really know where you're going. Luckily, the levels are small enough that you won't really get lost so much as go directions you didn't mean to go. The combat really suffers because it's all in 2-D, so the Rocksteady-designed Batfights we loved in Arkham Asylum and Arkham City are constrained to button tapping punches until you need to push the counter button. You repeat these in the sparse amount of combat scenes that are actually in the game, and you never face very many enemies at all. The usual encounter is 2-3.

Worse still, the 2-D battle field means enemies sometimes get spaced out far from Batman on the edge of the screen, interrupting the free-flowing combat that the game is supposed to feature. The ability we're used to in Arkham games to circle rooms and stalk enemies to quietly take down a group isn't incorporated here — you mainly just use Gargoyles as a place to traverse rooms without getting shot at. Stealth takedowns primarily happen as a result of popping up through vents that guards always seem to be standing on.

Despite a confusing map, boring combat and an overdone story (you meet up with Catwoman in a love-hate situation to face off against Black Mask, Penguin and Joker in a prison facility they've taken over — sound familiar?), Blackgate has some redeeming qualities. The boss battles are unique and fun and require you to do a bit of thinking to figure out how to take down each boss (there are also mini-bosses aside from the ones I just mentioned, including lesser Batvillains). An early example involves figuring out how to attack Black Mask without getting in the light where he can one-shot you. Additionally, the puzzle-solving aspects of the game are very Metroid-like. You won't be able to access the boss in any of the game's four main areas immediately. You have to complete pieces of each area to find gadgets that will allow you to progress in other areas. Then you have to figure out how to use those new tools to get past an obstacle that blocked your way before.

Still, Blackgate takes the Vita touch controls way too far. Even if you can obviously tell that a weak floor needs exploded with Batman's explosion gel, you can't shoot it until you've held your finger over the screen for a few seconds to "analyze" objects with which you can interact. The game also forces you to play most of it in detective mode because some objects that can be scanned are only a few pixels wide and you'd never see them otherwise. That's a real shame because the game looks really, really good. The character models are great and very detailed. It's even dumber that the cutscenes are poorly drawn motion comics instead of being done in-engine because, again, the actual game art is great!

I wanted to platinum this game because I did find myself enjoying finding all the hidden costumes, Joker teeth, etc. But it overstayed its welcome with a final slog before the last boss that involved a lot of backtracking and a frustratingly unresponsive boss battle. Then I figured out I couldn't even find all the stuff in the game without playing the entire campaign again. I was done, but I had an OK time. My final verdict is that if you're a Batfan, MAYBE TRY IT.

Crazy Market (Vita)

This is a newer free game on Vita that uses microtransactions if you want more powerups or more plays per day. But I've found it's enough for me to use the roughly three plays it gives you per day and then move on to the next thing. It's a silly idea that's fun only in short spurts. You use the touch screen to scan objects coming across a grocery store conveyor belt as quickly as possible, typing in codes for items that don't scan, and removing babies and bombs from the belt. It just has a fun Japanese vibe and bright art, and it's free so why not PLAY IT?

Hotline Miami (Vita)

Yep, I got the pretty difficult platinum on this one. A+'d every level. Performed every type of ground kill, melee kill, gun kill, etc. This is my favorite game on this list. It's so, so, so much fun! Sure, the art is 8-bit, and I don't think the music is as great as other people do, and the campaign story is trippy and I'm pretty sure about you being a serial killer who wears different animal masks. But ignore all of that. It's the core gameplay that matters here. Each level is pretty easy to beat, especially if you go in guns blazing. You can beat the campaign in a short amount of time. But this game is deep. Learning each map and the best way to approach it, learning to use melee more effectively and figuring out how to beat levels fast is a whole other story. I haven't felt like many games lately have those intricacies where you can 'beat' the game or you can 'master' the game. And learning to master Hotline Miami is pure bliss.

The controls are so perfectly done that you can run into a building, break someone's neck, pick up their knife, stab another enemy, pick up hit ninja star to turn around and throw at another enemy, whose shotgun you pick up to fire through a window to kill three other enemies, just as you turn and run through a door that smacks another enemy to the ground so you can grab a frying pan from the stove and beat him in the head with it before ... well, you get the point. Tons of weapons and tons of opportunities to maintain one constant combo flow from the beginning to the end of the level if you get good enough. It reminded me of Far Cry 3 when you unlock all the powerups and start combo killing an entire pirate outpost in one, fluid, powerful movement. That's the type of thing that makes a game, and a gamer, feel special. ABSO-FRIGGIN'-LUTELY PLAY IT.

Note: In order to save time and encourage me to write on MyIGN more often, I'm going to stop doing the meticulous copy-editing I used to do on all my posts. So please excuse spelling/grammar errors.

Are you enjoying the quickfire format? Have suggestions? Sound off in the comments below!

There is a lot of debate about what's better — Playstation, or Xbox? Such battles will rage on as long as there are console wars and fanboys. But as we get close to a new set of console launches next month, Microsoft's and Sony's online services deserve close evaluation. And what better point to evaluate than how the two big competitors in the games industry reward their loyal customers?

Lampooned for years because of security, patch and chat issues or functionality deficiencies, Sony's Playstation Network has seen an upgrade in its brand in recent years thanks to the success of Playstation Plus. Although using PSN and playing games online has always been free (unlike Microsoft's Xbox Live service, which requires a $60/year paid Gold upgrade to access most features), the PS+ program gives those willing to pay a $50/year subscription fee access to the Instant Games Collection — a set of standard free games coupled with new games that are free to download each month.

129 free PS Plus games so far

9 free Xbox Games with Gold games so far

PS+ subscribers got approximately 109 free games since 2010 on Playstation 3 (not to mention the free Playstation Vita games that started releasing in 2012). Microsoft started its Games with Gold promotion this year and has released nine games as of the time I began research for this article, although I know the tenth (Halo 3) goes up Oct. 16. GWG can't compare to the sheer number of free PS+ games just because it's been around a shorter amount of time (and Microsoft doesn't have a handheld to add on more games like Sony has done with 20 Vita titles so far). But volume of games aside, which subscription gets members the best bang for their buck?

Quality: Fun and freshness

I spent hours — yes, several of them — doing research to answer this very question of value once and for all.

(Full disclosure: I was a member of both services until last week when I let my Gold subscription expire because I've been playing more Vita than Xbox 360 and I already played Halo 3 years ago — I'll probably re-up when my friends want to play Halo 4 online or there's a new GWG title I want that I haven't already finished).

I don't want to share my opinion here so much as share the data I found and let the numbers do the talking. I made a big giant spreadsheet where I compiled review scores (from IGN, and then from Metacritic to add some balance from the sites aggregated there) and release years for every PS+ and GWG release ever (according to the lists for each service on Wikipedia).

The review scores and the release years are meant to provide insight into what I consider the two big critical factors on determining the quality of these free games — how fun they are (generally what a review score translates to) and how new they are (reducing the chance that you've already beaten them, which would therefore make them useless — cough, Halo 3, cough). So what did I find?

On average, PS+ games rate about 5 points lower on review scores than GWG games — 78 compared to 83, respectively. Of course, when releasing as much volume as PS+ has, probability says there is likelihood that there would be more bad games. However, if you compare the last nine PS3 PS+ releases to the nine GWG titles so far, Xbox still gets a three-point advantage, 83-80, over Playstation.

So Xbox gamers are getting higher-rated free games (the 80 average number doesn't change if you throw the last nine Vita titles into the mix), but what's the likelihood people have already played those games by the time Microsoft gives them away? Pretty high.

The average GWG game is about 3.5 years old by the time you're 'rewarded' with it.

Astonishingly, Sony gives out PS+ games when they are less than one year old on average! PS3 gamers have not seen a year in which free PS+ games averaged more than 1.4 years old. Vita owners have it even better. The average age of PS+ free Vita games since the program started? Less than one year, between four and five months.

If one service had the better games and the better release windows, it would be easy to declare a victor. But I guess the verdict is really still out with Microsoft providing a handful of better games and Sony providing a plethora of mediocre games — but more often and closer to release. For my money, even if every third game on PS+ is as good as every game on GWG, I'll take it because even mediocre games keep me from spending more money, and so far it's completely unrealistic to expect core gamers won't have already played the titles Microsoft is dropping each month. And PS+ is cheaper.

*Numbers have been rounded. Average scores can be either IGN or Metacritic, as the variance between the two is less than one point and rounds to the same number.

I still haven't had to pay any money for a Vita game. Seriously. PS Plus is that good. Beats the pants off the mediocre, really old games that Xbox Live Gold has been pushing off to subscribers. Some of these games are better than others, but even a little bit of enjoyment is pretty good at the cost of nothing. Check out my quick thoughts below on each title I've played so far.

Knytt Undergound

The first couple chapters are interesting and entertaining, but the gameplay gets repetitive and boring after a while. Though the art style seems a combination of Limbo and Metroid, and the game appears to be a Metroid-like exploration platformer, it ends up falling flat. There's really not much to do. You just walk from screen to screen collecting little pixels that you trade to NPCs to open up paths to more rooms where you'll do the exact same thing. Eventually, the game introduces some flying and bouncing mechanics to your sprite, but nothing that adds enough to break up the monotony. I didn't like how small all the sprites are either... and the map especially is tiny and causes you to squint, which is pretty silly in a game that relies on the map so heavily. The problem isn't with the Vita's screen size, it's with how the art for Knytt is sized in comparison to that real estate. My score: 5/10.

Unit 13

Another game that starts out really fun and had me into it but didn't live up to what I need from a game all the way throughout. Once you've completed about half of the missions, everything gets very, very similar. Some of the missions have timers or go into fail states if you get seen by enemies, which can get annoying from time to time. The maps get recycled a lot, and Unit 13 ends up becoming a repetitive game where you enter a building, clear a bunch enemies who look exactly the same, then run to an extraction point. The only real differences between the 'classes' you can choose from are the weapon loadouts, which don't matter very much because you can swap weapons mid-game with dead enemies. But the real deal breaker for me was when the missions started playing like Call of Duty and just constantly spawning enemies until I ran past a certain trigger point. To make matters worse, Unit 13 often spawns enemies with shotguns right behind you, resulting in an instant kill and a mission restart. Some missions have checkpoints that make sense, others don't.

The multiplayer for Unit 13 is completely throwaway because no one is playing it. I waited a long time for another player to start a match with a few times to no avail. It's a shame that the core design of the game is so flawed because the shooting and cover mechanics are actually fun and work pretty well. Hopefully someone else will take advantage of the Vita's twin sticks just as well but with a much more fun game sometime in the near future. My score: 6/10.

Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward

Yet again, another game that intrigued me early on and then ended with a womp. This game has two modes that you play during the course of the story — puzzle sections, which work like old-school first-person adventure games, and novel sections, which are mostly just screen-tapping fests where you listen to characters drone on about nonsensical Hideo Kojima-like (no, he wasn't involved with this game) terms. Sometimes you get to make decisions about whether to work with or betray your fellow prisoners as you all try to get through enough colored doors to escape the warehouse you all awoke in without any knowledge of how you got there.

The puzzles are pretty fun and mind-bending, and I was able to beat all of them on hard mode. But the game just completely dead ends and gives you a "to be continued" after getting about three-quarters of the way down the flowchart that shows you how far you are in the game. In order to get any further than that, you have to start at the very beginning and replay one of the other lines of the game, sort of like if you had to replay Mass Effect killing Wrex immediately after playing through the portion of the game where you made the decision to kill him. This sort of backtracking is boring and turned me off immediately. I was pretty disgusted when, after all my work, I awoke in the beginning level in the same elevator reading the same text I had already seen before. Even worse is the fact that I thought maybe this game was going to be updated with DLC at some point and didn't figure out what the whole "to be continued" screen meant without looking it up online — the game never tells you that this is how it works. My score: 6/10.

Wipeout 2048

I despise racing games, but Wipeout is pretty addictive and fun. Unlocking ships and trying to get elite passes on all of the stages is enjoyable. This game plays more like Mario Kart than anything else I can think of, but the rubberbanding ridiculousness doesn't seem to be present or at least doesn't get in the way as much. Time trials, races and especially battle events are great, but the game's pace is totally killed by boring, frustrating agility missions where the only goal is to do a zillion laps around the same track while the game increases your speed ever faster until you go so fast you bounce of walls and explode. That's the game's biggest flaw — even the ships with the best handling rating have issues turning and clip the walls a lot. The tracks just don't seem to be built with the right types of curves, even when you get good as using the game's double air-braking move. There seemed to be quite a few people playing Wipeout online still, and I'd recommend you try this one if you're a PS Plus subscriber or can get it cheap. My score: 7/10.

Dokuro

Dokuro is by far the best game of this set, featuring an interesting art style and adorable characters with bite-sized, challenging, puzzle-solving gameplay that's perfectly suited for the Vita platform. The stages are just difficult enough, and the game eases you into boggling your brain by teaching you to play with easier puzzles first. There are some minor combat mechanics, but they work well, and every now and then there's a boss battle to mix up the gameplay, which is welcome. Essentially, Dokuro is like taking on the role of fed-up goomba and helping Princess Peach escape from Bowser's castle. Your little skull-kid character clears danger out of the way of the damsel in distress so she can walk unscathed from the left side of the level to the right. Adventurous, expert players can also try to collect a special coin hidden in every level for extra trophies. I haven't finished Dokuro yet because it's so easy to pick up and put down and come back to later, which is a good thing for someone who is busy and games in chunks across multiple platforms like I do. My score: 8/10.

With last week's announcement of a price drop for the Playstation Vita — Sony's handheld platform and lesser-known mobile gaming device among a marketplace dominated by the Nintendo 3DS and iDevices — many of you might be considering buying one. The Vita has been out in North America for more than a year now but has been met with a slow adoption rate because of its price and a misconception that there aren't many games for it. But is the Vita an overlooked gem in an age of Angry Birds and Candy Crush?

So I bought a PS Vita....

I'll admit, I'm a little miffed that Sony just dropped the Vita's price recently at Gamescom 2013 in Germany. I had held out for quite a while on purchasing the Vita, hoping for a new model or a price drop or both. But when E3 came and went, and Shu Yoshida (@yosp) said that the current Vita will indeed be compatible with Playstation 4 when it releases for remote play, I figured maybe I had waited long enough. Coupling that with a few long flights that came along with my summer vacation meant I finally pulled the trigger. Considering I got the year-long PS Plus bundle version, paying the old price still hasn't turned out to be a bad deal — and I haven't bought a memory card yet, so the complementary price drops there are something of which I'll get to take advantage.

The major selling point that really tipped me over the edge to buy a Vita was the announcement that all PS4 games will be available for remote play on the Vita. That's exactly what I've always wanted — to be able to continue my console experience on the go instead of having to settle for an iOS game. Even though I don't have nearly the same amount of time to kill as I did back when I played my DS Lite on the train every day on my way into D.C., I still find there are plenty of opportunities where the Vita is a handy thing to have — when I show up early for meetings, long car rides, trips out of town for the weekend to visit family where packing up a whole console is cumbersome, etc. And the bite-sized experiences combined with the save-state pausing of native Vita games suit my busy lifestyle well. I may not always have two hours to sit down and do a quest in Dragon Age on my Xbox 360, but 30 minutes of Dokuro in bed or 15 minutes of Wipeout with my morning coffee before I head to work? Yes, please.

Truly a console experience in the palms of your hands

That difference in experience and game types overall is what I'm liking most so far now a little more than a month into owning the Vita. I've played a lot of iOS games and, though I don't own a 3DS, played just about everything on Nintendo's previous version, having owned an original DS and a DS Lite. Those games feel smaller in scale of the experience put forward, and the graphics stand out as handheld titles without always presenting themselves in a format conducive to chunkable gaming. But on the Vita, levels and missions are made just right for the busy (or commuting, or waiting, or bored-but-away-from-a-console) gamer. And the games look nearly console quality. The selection of RPGs is amazing, and indie developers are very well represented. When I've played any other handheld devices, I've missed my console. But with the Vita, I don't feel that way. The dual sticks definitely help, as does the perfect feeling to the shoulder buttons. The Vita is truly the closest thing to having a console experience in your hand, and for that reason alone it's a shame more people don't own one. The software is there (it's just not Mario and Zelda), and now, so is the price.

Vita's here to stay, but it ain't perfect

All that being said, the Vita is first and foremost a gaming device and really half-asses just about everything else. The user interface, operating system and apps are all pretty horrible, in fact. If you stick to games, you'll enjoy every moment of the Vita. But trying to use the half-featured Facebook app or the unofficial Twitter app that's available is like pounding your head against a wall. YouTube just completely has never worked for me, unless I find the link through the Vita's browser and open it there instead. That browser is slow and awkward to use, just like the Vita's keyboard. We're all so used to tapping to type now, sure, but the Vita is just wide enough to make you unable to reach middle letters on the keyboard. Thankfully, the device does have a nice word suggestion feature that allows you to finish typing with just one tap, but communicating this way or doing searches is altogether just best left alone. The Netflix app is the only thing worth your time on Vita. I should note that I've had the operating system crash on me a couple of times where it just freezes up entirely and requires a hard reset. Additionally, I often encounter issues with the touchscreen (front or back) not working while the device is plugged into its charger.

I'm a little addicted to my Vita already. And as someone who is a Xbox 360 gamer planning to jump ship to PS4, knowing that my Vita trophies on PSN will carry over and that I have an opportunity to start building out my profile now is another great reason to spend time playing the device. I love the graphical capabilities, the controls (especially the twin sticks) and the types of games and community of people who play the Vita. The PS Plus subscription that came with my bundle has been amazing — I have yet to buy a game, thanks to all of the free ones Sony has given me. Gravity Rush, Uncharted, Germinator, Unit 13, Virtue's Last Reward, Dokuro and a slew of PSP ports are just a few. However, Vita memory cards are in a proprietary Sony format that's very expensive, even though they just look like your typical MircoSD cards. Even with the recent announcement that memory cards are dropping in price, they're still pretty outrageous when compared to what memory costs elsewhere. This means I've instead been beating a game, deleting it and downloading the next one.

The Playstation Vita is an amazing device that blows the 3DS out of the water with its graphics, controls and library of interesting, more mature titles and community. But Sony threw way too many unnecessary resources into useless features that don't matter — apps, back touch (which pretty much zero games use in any meaningful way), etc. If these things were going to be a focal point, it'd be nice to at least have them regularly patched so they're at least functional (unlike the YouTube app). Minor hiccups like OS freezes also need patched and add a layer of annoyance to my experience from time to time. Although the ability to pause several applications on the Vita at once and resume them later is nice, the swiping around left, right, up, down, inside and out of menus makes for an initially confusing user interface that you eventually learn to live with but never quite like. It borrows heavily from the pooh-poohed Xbox blades dashboard of old.

As long as I ignore the areas of the Vita where it fails entirely and just keep playing games on it, I stay very happy with my choice to start gaming on this platform. And honestly, much like I don't want motion controls or 3D in my console gaming, I could care less if the Vita does the things that the iPhone in my pocket already does anyway. But there still isn't a killer app for Vita, so I find myself really tired of games quickly because they've all been mediocre so far. But the game designers on Vita seem to get the format and length right, even if they don't always get the mechanics down pat. Even though Unit 13 had horrible respawning enemies and cliche trigger points throughout that ultimately made me just quit it cold turkey, the 5- to 10-minute building-clearing missions are exactly what I need in my life.

If you can grab a Vita and a year of PS Plus, my guess is you'll be one happy gamer who never again has to go crazy over needing that console gaming fix when away from the man (or woman) cave.